The invention relates to a system for transferring data related to a calling card function in a telecommunications network according to the preamble of claim 1, a server according to the preamble of claim 9, a method according to the preamble of claim 10, a computer program according to the preamble of claim 13 and a computer program product according to the preamble of claim 14.
Calling card services are provided today in a packet switched network. For this packet switched telecommunications networks, like the internet protocol multimedia subsystem, the calling card functionality, e.g. interactive voice response and charging, is provided by transferring the data between a serving call session control function server and one or more servers providing calling card charging system and the calling card functionality.
In existing solutions the server providing the online charging system is already part of the packet switched telecommunications network and uses a packet switching protocol for transferring the data. However the calling card charging system is part of a circuit switched telecommunications network, e.g. the well known public switched telephone network, using a circuit switching protocol.
Therefore the calling card charging system is connected to the packet switched telecommunications network via a gateway. The gateway translates from a circuit switching protocol to a packet switching protocol and vice-versa.
A reference model for online charging for a service in a packet switched telecommunications network, like the IP multi-media subsystem, is defined by current telecommunications standards. An example is the Diameter Ro interface defined by 3GPP 32.296 V. 8.3.0, 32.299 V.9.0.0 section 5.2.1 and 32.260 V. 9.0.0 section 5.3.2.
However the reference model for online charging enables credit control and authentication only. There is no fully internet protocol based calling card functionality defined in the reference model.
Currently not only the online charging system in the packet switched network is used, but also the additional calling card charging system is maintained in the circuit switched network. This calling card charging system is connected to the packet switched network via the gateway. This means that a time consuming and costly translation from the packet switching protocol to the circuit switching protocol and vice-versa has to be performed by the gateway in order to provide the calling card service.
The object of the invention is thus to provide an efficient calling card solution in a packet switched network.